Is it just the pale echo of a century's trauma? Is this '14 the year of the turning of the ages, like it was in 1914?
And like it was in 1814, of course. As every educated person knows, that was the year that the post-Enlightenment world order was created. Well, that and the year after it, of course, in a long conference of delegates in Vienna that lasted in to spring of 1815.
The conference was at the end of the long era of the Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon had been defeated and was in exile (his first of two). In the peaceful aftermath, the crowned heads of Europe and their delegates, all the victor and vanquished, met behind closed doors for months and decided how the world would look like. They had to interrupt the conference to put Napoleon back in exile again, but eventually they wrapped up an agreement they all of them could sign.
The agreement attempted to create a new long-lasting peace in Europe and on the High Seas. Essentially it put the responsibility of maintaining this new global peace on Great Britain. As the strongest nation at the conference, Britain had arranged it so.
The agreement was amazing successful and stable. Over the next decades, the agreement would not only maintain the peace for the most part, but would create enormous world economic growth. IT would make London the center of a vast new and expanded global financial network, made possible in part by the order imposed on the sea by the British navy, which in turn allowed Britain to effectively monopolize the global banking system by a process of centralization.
The long world peace allowed the flourishing of a new liberal world system that gave birth to the great liberation movements of that century. The United States in particular took advantage of the greatly expanded free flow of goods and peoples to achieve incredible economic growth for an extended period of time, all while allowing most citizens to do as they please and to pay very little taxes.
Of course, this growth in the U.S. was necessarily accomplished by integration of the nascent U.S. banking system into the credit markets of London and the continent of Europe. In simple terms, it would have been impossible for the U.S. to become what it did, in the manner it did, without vast amounts of European capital that made its way to America through this system.
This British and European capital underwrote great public works and capitalistic enterprises in America as the young country stretched across the North American continent. In many ways this reintegration of America with London was effectively a reversal of what had been achieved by the American War of Independence. But it was inevitable.
It in disputable that the amazing agreement made back in Vienna in 1814-1815 was possible in part because the crowned heads and delegates were able to meet in private. They did not have to hold press conferences or provide minutes of their meetings for public consumption and official records. There were no recalcitrant legislatures back at home that had to be satisfied after the fact.
There were no nosy news reporters pestering, and trying to sabotage their efforts by publicizing their negotiations openly to a misunderstanding public (they were no doubt plenty of spies from other delegations, of course, but that was still private of the internal private way things were done).
It was beautiful, what they created. It must have seemed so perfect for so long.
It lasted ninety-nine years and came down it an Apocalyptic heap of fire, ashes, and poison gas.
The process of disintegration formally started one hundred years ago this week. Once Ferdinand had been assassinated, the tripwires were set into motion---one declaration of war invoking another. The great armies were necessarily mobilized for irreversible advances according to intricate war plans. It was like a computer program playing out.
Emperors who were cousins cried when they were forced to declare war on each other. They sent waves of young men farmers and factory workers against each other to disembowel each other with bayonets, and to shoot out each others guts.
But it is a lie to say that no one wanted that war.
Many people certainly wanted it to happen. Some of them were common folk who loved the idea of tribal blood lust, and eagerly signed up for the chance to partake in it. Others saw in it the change to accomplish large-scale social change. Others were the ones who had booby-trapped the world over the ninety-nine years since Vienna, to make it into the Rube Goldberg apparatus of world destruction that it became.
There were also those few, among the powerful, who wanted the war to happen because they thought they could benefit from it some grand way, by the aggrandizement of their nation, or even more primitively perhaps of the temptation to become a Great Actor on the Stage of History. There is nothing like war for that, to create opportunities to be that kind of Great Actor, and to shape the destiny of nations and peoples with one's will.
This is precisely what one can learn from Napoleon---how to be that Great Actor on the stage of history. Part of the lesson he provides is obvious: to be a Great Actor in History, one usually must necessarily create piles of human skulls. It sounds tragic and unjust, and feels like a great tragedy as it is playing out, but it is impossible dispute its truth. For those that survive, the world will be much better than it was before.
The Germans in particular were obsessed with trying to figure out Napoleon's lessons, because they had been so thoroughly defeated by him. He had re-arranged the entire German nation as he crossed it, even all the way across Prussia.
Many a tender flower must be crushed, Fichte wrote. He was among the first German philosophers to try to understand the post-Napoleonic world. Out of his writings came those of Hegel, who attempted to formulate a theory of history. Out of Hegel's work came that of Marx, who refined and (some say) successfully formulated the correct theory of how history progresses from one great age to the next.
That's why Marx is the darling of the elite, and why they have pushed him so much for a century now. Marx is their great prophet of power, right along with a few others like Freud and Nietzsche.
Napoleon acted. Marx theorized. That's how one might understand it.
Marx even showed the way to co-opt the liberalizing movements of the Nineteenth Century, and steer them back into a form of centralized control, managed by a elite group of insiders. Lenin mastered this method. It involved setting up fake populist movements based on slogans that satisfy deep feelings in the people for justice and vague change.
Steer their ambitions for both justice and petty advantage to your own movements. They will be your foot soldiers. The people are so easily fooled that way. They are steered, like sheep and puppets, but it is ultimately for their own good of course. At least, that how the thinking goes in some circles, such as in both Neoconservatism, which is an Americanized form of Trotskyite Internationalist Marxism (World revolution wiht an American flag on it and with U.S. on top), as well as in Alinsky-style Leftism.
It is well established that the People will vote for a slogan of freedom and willfully hand over their power to anyone who will provide them with the security of not actually having to participate in world events. Also the bread and circuses thing works amazing well too. Tell them: just go live your life. Go and push a pin through a piece of paper every couple years. And of course let yourself be taxed.
All you have to do is sell them the same romantic stuff about the sacredness of Democracy. Tell the people that they are King. Absurd. Everyone who is educated knows this to be true.
That brings us to today.
Now I ask you: who is it who wants this next war to happen, the shadow big one they are trying to sell us like so much snake oil?
It's casting call for the Great Actors of Two-Thousand-and-Doomsday! Step up and strut across the stage and have your name recorded as "significant in the creation of the Twenty-First Century order."
It will make a great HBO series sometime in the future.
Or maybe we just ignore them and "don't show up" for their war, like that old hippie slogan for the Sixties.
Peace out, y'all.
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